As we enter National Cyber Security Awareness Month, it’s only fitting that we spend some time thinking about the security of our intellectual property (IP), specifically our creative IP. For most creative professionals, your work product is your livelihood and central to the success of your business. While creative IP conversations typically focus on finished work product, more attention needs to be paid to ideation and creation stages of the process. For creatives, this means taking steps to protect and maintain the integrity of the creative workflow.

Throughout the creative process, you share everything from brand identities and new product images to creative campaign concepts with colleagues, clients, and agency partners. The reverse is also true—and your clients and partners want to keep their IP away from their competitors. So how can you help make sure that these assets are reaching only the people for whom they’re intended?

The answer lies within Adobe Acrobat DC. By keeping the creative workflow in the digital domain, you can benefit from the inherent security features of Adobe Acrobat DC—which let you to control access to and protect your creative IP, maintain the integrity of your work, and safeguard your livelihood.

Let’s explore the halo of security that surrounds the creative workflow in Acrobat DC and Adobe Document Cloud.

1. Preserving asset authenticity

You spend hours, days, weeks, or sometimes even longer nurturing and honing your creative concepts, taking them from ideation to realization. Sharing your brainchild with others is already a nerve-wracking process—the last thing you need to worry about is somebody tampering with or stealing your work. Using Acrobat DC, you can protect the integrity of PDF content and the quality of your output by preventing files from being altered or printed, adding encryption capabilities, and sharing certificates for secure workflows.

The use of Digital IDs helps you to authenticate stakeholders when you send files or collect digital signatures from within Acrobat—for instance, when a client needs to approve a creative concept. You can also rest assured that you’re protected on an application level: Acrobat DC is continuously updated to minimize vulnerabilities and keep sensitive information private, both inside and outside the firewall.

2. Controlling access

At certain points during the creative workflow, it can feel like there are too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen. Restricting and managing digital access can quickly spiral out of control unless there are safeguards in place. Think about how easy it would be for a client to forward an email with a file attached for review, either to a non-authorized reviewer or to a personal email account. Chances are, this has happened to you on some level, and you didn’t even know it.

The Send and Track feature within Acrobat DC lets you control your work from any device. See who has previewed or downloaded a file and even unshare a file if needed. You can also use the Send for Comments feature to manage the review process entirely within the application, giving you visibility into the actions of your stakeholders while maintaining an efficient creative workflow that also helps keep projects on track. Edit and copy restrictions can also be applied automatically when you redact, password-protect, and save content in Acrobat Pro DC.

3. Signed, sealed, and delivered

We touched on the e-signature capabilities in Acrobat earlier, but these warrant more than just a mere mention. Documents—whether they’re contracts or creative assets—can be sent directly to approvers for digital signature using the Send for Signature feature. This is a legally binding approval, with the entire process tracked and recorded in an audit trail. Naturally, the sensitivity of the documents being sent for signature necessitates strict controls. That’s why we use the same enterprise-class technology behind Adobe Sign to power the Send for Signature functionality in Acrobat DC—whether you’re using Acrobat as part of Document Cloud or not.

Security is a serious matter for creatives. Learn more about the security features and functionalities of Adobe Acrobat and how they can help you protect your creative assets.

Be sure to join us at Adobe MAX in Las Vegas for even more pearls of wisdom about Adobe Acrobat. We’ll be having a couple of sessions on how Creatives can get the most out of Acrobat and Adobe Document Cloud – and details are available here.